Learning the reason of anything, by which we generally mean the cause of
it, is a process the instructive benefit of which is not limited by the
subject immediately under consideration. To trace the relation of cause
and effect is a very great and very important part of true education; of
which, it needs hardly here to be said, book-learning is only a help and
adjunct. Indeed, this learning or finding of causes is an education or
discipline which for those who give themselves to intellectual pursuits,
continues all their lives. It is the chief occupation of philosophers,
of men of science, of investigators, of all real students. Virgil—who
was not a very great poet, being of the second, or even of the third
rank, because of his moderate creative power, his lack of vividness of
imagination and liveliness of fancy, but who is remarkable for a broad
and serene thoughtfulness—said: “Happy is he who is able to discover
the causes of things.”[A] And indeed this process of finding causes is
one of the most delightful and fascinating, and, to the soul of man,
most profitable, in which man can engage. Of which the chief reason
is the close and intimate relation that exists between all facts and
thoughts and things. Isolation and independence are conditions hardly
discoverable. Men can not be independent of each other, as we all find
very early in life, if we observe and think. But yet, a man may isolate
himself upon the top of a pillar; or he may build himself a hut in the
woods, and give himself up to contemplation; thinking that in this way
he will discover or evolve something that otherwise would be concealed.
The discoveries and the evolutions in these cases, however, do not prove
of much value, either to the individuals or to mankind. An isolated
man, although monstrous, abnormal, unnatural, is possible, but not an
isolated fact. An isolated fact is almost, if not quite, a contradiction
in terms; for a fact implies conditions and causes from which it can not
be separated. We shall thus find that the inquiry into the cause of such
a simple, every-day fact as our speaking English will lead us through,
although not over, the whole range of the history, known and conjectured,
of that great family of the human race to which the people of Europe and
of civilized America belong. To follow the steps of this inquiry will not
be difficult, and, I hope, not uninteresting to the least learned reader
of this magazine.
Why, then, do we in the United States of America speak English? Because
that language is the speech of the English, or the so-called, Anglo-Saxon
people? Because our forefathers came from England? Partly so. These
facts have certain relations with that into the causes of which we are
inquiring, but they do not wholly account for it. For although we are, in
the main, an English people, and the forefathers of most of us did come
from England, there are now many, although comparatively few, of us who
are of Irish or of German blood. Moreover, in Ireland there are millions
of Irishmen, Celts, who hate “the Saxon” (that is the English), but who
speak English, and whose forefathers have spoken it for many generations.
Now, the first reason why those Irishmen speak, and so long have spoken
English, is a very simple, bald and cogent one, and it is the very reason
of our speaking that language. It is, necessity: nothing more. The Celtic
Irishman whose race-tongue was Erse, spoke English for the very reason
that we, whose race-tongue it is, speak it; because he must speak it to
be understood; for no other reason. But how came this necessity about?
How came English speech into Ireland or into America, or, for that
matter, into England?
Language is a mere instrument of man’s convenience; as much so as a
spade or a knife, or any other tool. He uses it for the purpose of
communicating with those by whom he is surrounded; and he must give to
things and thoughts the names which they give them, or he might as well
be dumb. If they call a certain animal a horse, it will not do for him
to call it a _cheval_; and if they call it _un cheval_, it will not do
for him to call it _ung shovel_, as many persons have found in France to
their surprise and inconvenience. And if he is born and bred in France,
no matter how thoroughly English or Irish he may be in blood, he will
call it _un cheval_, without effort and without thought.
These are obvious facts; but for our present purpose they are not trite,
nor is the consideration of them trifling. They have bearing upon the
very common belief, or assumption, that language is a product of race;
that there is some mysterious and inevitable connection between man’s
physical and mental constitution and the language that he speaks. There
is no such connection. Manner of speech and style of writing are peculiar
in various peoples, as their manner and their style in other things and
acts are peculiar. There is a French style of speaking, as there is
an Italian, an Irish, and an English, which pertains to those various
peoples, and which is a product of their national spirit, their genius,
as we say. But there is no such influence of national spirit, or of
physiological traits or conditions upon the substance of language—words.
The Irish did not speak Erse, because Erse was a natural product of the
Irish physical or mental constitution. So with the English; so with all
peoples. An English, a German or a French boy, born and brought up in
Russia, would speak Russian; and (personal peculiarities apart) they
all would speak it alike, and without the least modification dependent
upon their respective English, German, and French physical and mental
constitution. If, however, their mothers were with them, and their
mothers could speak no Russian, each of those boys would speak two
languages, English and Russian, or German and Russian, or French and
Russian, and, accidents apart, each of them would speak his two equally
well, and with equal freedom. He would think with equal freedom in both.
Some of my readers must know, from their own observation, that this is
true; and yet I do not doubt that even of these there are not a few who
have never thought of it as evidence that, although certain languages are
spoken by certain races, this is not because there is any natural and
peculiar fitness of the words of any one language to the character or the
spirit of any one people. The language used by any and every people has a
historical origin; and the peculiar forms of its words are the product of
time, of circumstance, and probably, in a certain very moderate measure,
of climate, and of physiological conditions.
The sun and the moon received their names for good reasons; the former
because it is the creator (light and heat being the causes of inorganic
life), and the latter because it was the first measurer of time; and
these names they have borne for at least four thousand years—we do not
know how much longer. But now those words have become mere names; mere
sounds which are the vocal indications of the objects to which they are
applied, so that if by some wizardry we were all, with one exception, to
wake up to-morrow calling the light which rules the day, moon, and that
which rules the night, sun, we should be perfectly satisfied, and find in
it no inconvenience; and moreover we should look upon him who used the
words in the converse senses, that we had forgotten, as a madman.
Words however have, with very few exceptions, a real meaning, or at least
a reason for their use, as _sun_ and _moon_ have. The words without
such meaning may be all told upon the fingers. Two words of scientific
origin, but very common use, are illustrative examples—_chloroform_
and _gas_, both of which are of recent, the former of very recent,
fabrication. Chloroform is so called because it is, or is supposed to be,
a chloride of formyl, which is the base of formic acid, a fluid found in
red ants; _formica_ being the Latin for ant. It was desirable to have a
convenient name for this substance, and the name was made by uniting the
first syllable of _chloride_, or _chlorine_, with the first syllable of
_formyl_; whence we have _chloro-form_. The name _gas_ was invented, we
know not why or wherefore, by a Dutch chemist, some two hundred and fifty
years ago, for all those compressible, air-like fluids to which it is
now applied. It was convenient and came first into scientific and then
into general use, so that now it is one of the commonest words, even in
a sarcastic, metaphorical sense, in the speech of all civilized peoples.
Now nearly all words have a significant origin, like _chloroform_. Those
which are without inherent significance, like gas, are very few indeed.
Words like these, and like _oxygen_ (which is only about one hundred and
fifty years old, and means acid-maker), are called coined words, because
they were recently and deliberately made. The words which form the bulk
of language are of very remote origin, and, until lately, of untraced
growth.
The tracing of the growth of words which has been scientifically—that
is, historically and logically—prosecuted for a little more than fifty
years, has brought to light the important fact—a fact the discovery of
which is second in importance only to that of the discovery of the law
of gravitation—that all the languages of the civilized peoples of Europe
and America, together with some in Asia, have a common origin. At one
time there was no English, no French, no German, no Russian language, no
Erse or Gælic, no Latin, no Greek; but at that time the germ of all these
languages, and of others which need not be mentioned, existed in a tongue
which for more than four thousand years has been unspoken, but which from
the people who spoke it has been called Aryan (pronounced _Ahrian_).
This discovery was sure to have been made in one way or another; but the
immediate cause of it was the presence in Hindostan of the British East
India Company. In 1776, N. B. Halhed, a servant of that company, who had
been an early friend of Sheridan, the orator and dramatist, published a
Bengali grammar, in which he mentions as very remarkable, “the similitude
of Sanskrit words with those of Persian and Arabic (?), and even of Latin
and Greek; and these not in technical and metaphorical terms, which the
mutation of refined arts and improved manners might have occasionally
introduced, but in the main groundwork of the language, in monosyllables,
in the names of numbers, and the appellations of such things as would be
first discriminated on the first dawn of civilization.” Soon afterward,
in 1786, Sir William Jones, who had gone to Bengal as a judge, in a paper
in “Asiatic Researches,” expressed a like opinion more strongly and in
more comprehensive terms. “The Sanskrit language,” he says, “whatever
may be its antiquity is of a wonderful structure, more perfect than
the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined
than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in
the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar[B] than could have been
produced by accident, so strong that no philologer could examine all the
three without believing them to have sprung from one common source, which
perhaps no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite
so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though
blended with a different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit.
The old Persian may be added to the same family.”
What Halhed and Jones put forth as strong probability was ere long found,
was clearly proved, to be the truth. Persian, Greek, Latin, Gothic,
Celtic, and of course all languages derived from them, were discovered to
be identical in origin with Sanskrit. Now, what was this Sanskrit, this
wonderful language which so suddenly and so surely unlocked the mystery
of the world’s speech, and revealed the source of all the languages of
civilized Europe, and some of those of Asia? Sanskrit, (the name means
worked-together, elaborated, highly finished,) is the sacred language of
the Brahmans, in which was preserved the religious teachings and legends
of the people of India, whom we call Hindoos. It is quite four thousand
years old in its existing form. For a very long time it was unwritten,
the Brahmans having no letters; and the sacred books (so we must call
them) were transmitted orally, but with such veneration not only for
their doctrine and their story, but their phraseology in its minutest
particulars, that among the Brahmans grammar became a religion, and the
slightest variation from the text of the Vedas—this was the name of the
sacred books—was regarded as a sin. Punctilio in this respect was carried
so far that when letters were borrowed from the West, and an alphabet
was formed, and the Vedas were written, it was protested against by the
conservatives as a sacrilege. Common sense and convenience, however,
carried the day. Sanskrit is the most elaborate, the most minutely
divided, the most elaborately inflected speech known to man. The sight
of a Sanskrit grammar is appalling to the common sense of our day. There
are ten conjugations of verbs; and a verb has ten tenses; and each one
of these tenses has three numbers, singular, dual and plural; and each
tense has two sets of terminations. Nouns, adjectives and pronouns are
singular, dual and plural, and have eight cases. Inflections of all
words are distracting for multitude and intricacy. Yet this elaborately
intricate language was spoken in what we think of as the wilds of Asia
long before the history of the human race is known; at least four
thousand years ago.
A Frenchman named de Chésy learned Sanskrit from a British officer named
Hamilton, who, on his way from India, was detained in France, and taught
it, as he says, to Franz Bopp, a German philologist, who made use of it
in a work on the system of conjugation, and thus became, unintentionally,
a Columbus-like discoverer of the great science of Comparative Philology.
For Bopp “builded better than he knew.” His purpose was merely to
work out his system of conjugation; but in doing this he revealed and
established the unity of speech in all the Aryan or Indo-European
peoples. This he himself afterward elaborated in his “Comparative
Grammar” of the chief Aryan languages. Then came another great German
philologist, Jacob Grimm, who discovered the law, or method, according to
which words changed their forms; and the great end was accomplished. This
happened in 1816-19; and since that time Comparative Philology has worked
upon the lines indicated by Bopp and Grimm. Bopp’s great “Comparative
Grammar,” however, did not appear until 1833.
One of the most important, if not the most important of the results of
the discovery of Sanskrit, and the consequent prosecution of the study
of language upon the historical and comparative method—the only safe
method for the study of any subject—is the revelation of the origin, and
to a certain and very remarkable degree, of the early unrecorded history
of the Aryan or Indo-European peoples; that race which has received the
latter name because it occupies, and for two thousand years and more has
occupied, all India and Europe. Let us glance at this history as it is
thus revealed, for it is very much to our present purpose.
Take a good map of Asia, one which shows the eastern confines of Europe,
and turn your attention to the country now called Joorkistan, lying
between the Caspian Sea and the western boundary of the Chinese Empire.
There, some five or six thousand years ago, (it will not do to be too
particular, all the more because we can not, if we would,) about the
foot of the Hindoo Kosh, and around the sources of the Oxus, there
lived, we have good reason to believe, a people who called themselves
Aryan. They were a white race; much fairer, at least, than the people
who were then occupying Europe and the other parts of Asia. They were
strong of body, intelligent and enterprising. They did not live only
by hunting and herding, like the nomadic peoples, their neighbors, but
cultivated the ground. Their name, Aryan, means honorable, noble; and
there is some reason for believing that it is connected with their
agricultural pursuits and distinction. For reasons which of course we do
not know, but probably from the pressure of population, more than four
thousand years ago this people began to send out bodies of emigrants.
They moved westward, toward the Caspian Sea, of the existence of which
they were probably ignorant. They had used boats upon the Oxus, but the
history of their language shows that they knew nothing of what we call
navigation. Their progress seems to have been slow, but continuous, one
body of emigrants being ere long followed by another. We may be sure
that they had to fight their way. So late as eight hundred years ago all
emigration was armed. The strong took the land red-handed from the weak,
or at least from those who were not so strong and so numerous as they
were themselves. The Aryans reached the Caspian Sea; and took possession
of the country lying south of it, since known as Persia. After a time,
we know not how long, emigration began again from this point. But here
the advancing people divided. Some of them moved in a south-westerly
direction; and this stream of emigration continued until it overflowed
all the vast territory now known as Afghanistan, Belochistan and
Hindostan. Another stream moved westward and northward, and passed
through Turkey in Asia into Europe.
We have reason for believing that up to the time when this division took
place in the country south of the Caspian Sea, the Aryan people spoke
one language; but sufficient time had already elapsed for a considerable
change to have taken place in the tongue which was spoken on the plains
at the foot of the Hindoo Kosh. Language changes rapidly among people
in a low state of civilization, without literature, without letters
which are the landmarks and conservators of speech. But this point of
time and of place is that of a great division in the speech of the
Aryan people. Of the language of those who moved westward into Europe
there are no remains which date within many centuries of this period;
but of the language of those who moved south into Hindostan, we have in
the existing Sanskrit a representative which is of almost indefinable
antiquity, and the perfect preservation of which is marvelous. It is
no rude, ruinous relic, but complete, elaborate, and finished to the
highest point of perfection in its kind. It will be seen (and this must
be constantly borne in mind) that Sanskrit is not the original Aryan
language, but only the oldest existing offshoot from that language.
The great, the inestimable value of the discovery of Sanskrit was not
that we find in it the source of other languages, not that in it was
the origin of the words spoken by the various peoples of Europe; but
that it furnished evidence of the most important fact in the history of
language, one of the most important facts in the history of the world.
It had been assumed that the countless words which were similar in the
language of the European peoples, and the many which were identical,
were derived one from another; that they were adopted by one people from
the language of another; that they were the product of neighborhood, of
intercourse, of imitation, of convection—that is that they were carried
from one country and people into another. The discovery and the study of
Sanskrit proved that these words, or most of them, came into the various
languages in which they are found, not by any or by all of these methods,
but by direct descent from a speech which was at one time common to the
forefathers of all the peoples in India, in Persia, and in Europe. Of
these various languages Sanskrit is not only the oldest, but so very much
the oldest that it carries us up very far toward the original speech
of the Aryan or Indo-European race; so far that we are not without
reasonable hope that philological science may elaborate by its help a
proximate form of the elements of the original Aryan speech.
It is worthy of remark that the European language most like the Sanskrit,
most like it in substance, and notably most like it in grammatical
structure, is the Greek; the language of the people nearest Asia, nearest
the point of the division of the Aryan people into two great streams of
emigration.[C] And here, too, it may well be remarked that the book of
Genesis, in one of those ethnological passages which reveal a knowledge
of prehistoric man so perfectly in accordance with the results of modern
historical inquiry and scientific investigation that it would seem that
they must have been a revelation from Omniscience, makes the confusion
of tongues and the consequent dispersion of nations take place upon
the plains of Shinar, in the very region, at least, where the Aryan
dispersion began.
To resume our brief story of the Aryan advance to take possession of the
world; for we are no longer concerned with what went on in India or the
East. Many centuries had now elapsed, and the Aryan people had multiplied
into many millions of men, and had formed themselves into nations or
peoples ignorant of their common origin, and regarding each other as all
peoples then regarded each other, as enemies, rivals in the possession of
the earth and its products. The emigration continued; those in advance
being driven and pushed on by those who followed. Europe once entered,
there was again a division of the stream of advancing, conquering men.
The dispersion was doubtless greater than before, but again there were
two main bodies, one keeping to the south along the northern shores of
the Mediterranean Sea, the other moving northward, toward the Baltic. The
former has been designated from the principal peoples involved in it,
or resulting from it, the Italo-Græco-Celtic strain; the latter is the
Gothic. It is with this that we are chiefly, but by no means exclusively,
concerned. We are Goths.
It has just been said that those who were in the advance in this great
emigration were pushed on by those who followed. Who were the advance
of this westward movement, the first Aryans who entered Europe? There
is no reasonable doubt that they were the Celts, the people who, some
thirteen hundred years ago, were in absolute and complete possession
of the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, and a small part of the
northwestern coast of what is now, but was not then, France. These
people, this head of the Aryan column, passed through southern Europe,
(we know it by the names they left behind them, given to places during
their temporary, but not short occupation of the soil,) and coming to
the ocean, went northward, then crossed the English channel, and took
possession of Britain and Ireland. There they stopped simply because they
could go no farther. But they were still pushed by those who followed.
The invasion of Britain by the Romans, and yet more, the after invasion
and occupation of it by the so-called Anglo-Saxons, our forefathers, were
a _mere continuation of the Aryan emigration_ which had begun at the foot
of the Hindoo Kosh, in Asia, thousands of years before.
These Celts who went first were followed by the people who, in close
connection with them as to time and affiliation of blood, became the
Latin races (old Romans, Italians, Spaniards, French), and the Greeks.
It was natural that the first stream of Aryan emigration into Europe
should take its course through the countries of these peoples, because
they lie at the south, on the borders of the Mediterranean Sea. Men
never go northward to find homes amid snows and ice one half the year,
if they can find land of more genial clime unoccupied or occupyable. The
leading bodies of the Celts having reached the ocean in the southern part
of Europe, and being pushed on by the steady flow from behind, moved
northward, and as we have already seen, at last left the continent, and
rested in Britain and Ireland. Here, from their insular position, they
were able to maintain their footing firmly, if not undisturbed, for
many centuries. They were not displaced in Britain until about thirteen
centuries ago; and then they were not driven onward, as before they had
been driven; for there was no place whither to drive them. They were, in
the words of an old adage, perhaps as old as this very time, “between the
devil and the deep sea;” and most of them were slain to make room for
their fellow Aryans, their far-away kindred, whom they knew not, and had
no reason to know, and whom they hated with good reason.
The Goths, of whose race we are, and from whom we directly come, moved
northwestward from the western shores of the Black Sea, where they are
first heard of. Their language, in its original form, is lost like
the great original Aryan tongue; but as in the case of that tongue,
a very early offshoot of it has been happily preserved. This is the
Mæso-Gothic, into which Ulphilas, a bishop of the Mæso-Goths, who had
become Christians, translated the New Testament and part of the Old about
one thousand five hundred years ago. Of the former a very considerable
part remains. It is written in large silver letters, on parchment of a
beautiful purple tint. This work shows us all of the structure and much
of the substance of the Mæso-Gothic language; and in the former even
more than in the latter affords, like the Greek, evidence of an origin
identical with that of Sanskrit.
The Gothic people pushed, and were pushed, northward, and began, in their
turn, to divide and to disperse, and soon to be unable to understand each
other’s speech, and to regard each other as foreigners and enemies. For
it must be remembered that these migrations were slow, extending through
centuries; that they consisted of alternate movement and settlement;
settlement for many generations in one place; so that the mountains and
streams and forests still retain evidences of this residence, in the
names given to them by these tribes or sub-tribes of the Aryan people.
It must be remembered, too, that in these remote times, at that early
stage of civilization, when there were no books, except a few manuscripts
on parchment, no strongly built towns, no stability of government, and
when inter-communication was slow, difficult and dangerous, an interval
of a hundred years was quite as long as one of five hundred of the years
last passed, in its effect of separation and isolation of peoples, in its
dividing families into tribes, and tribes into strange and hostile little
nations.
From the Goths there was now a new offshoot, one destined to power and
preëminence in the future of the human race. While the greater number of
them remained in the country which for some eighteen centuries has been
loosely called Germany, a large body of them moved northward and took
possession of the countries now known as Denmark, Sweden and Norway, with
the neighboring islands. These people are known ethnologically as the
Scandinavians; and it is from them, and from some very near neighbors
of theirs, also of Gothic race, who settled in the country in and about
the lower part of Jutland (the old name of Denmark), that the English
people, of whom we are a part, are descended.[D] It so happened that in
the continuance of the westward movement of the Aryan people there was a
union on the island of Great Britain, of emigrants from Denmark and the
neighboring country on the continent, and from the western part of the
great northern Scandinavian peninsula (Norway); and the result of that
union, which was some eight centuries in forming, was the English people,
by whom chiefly this country was settled only some two hundred and fifty
years ago, and by whom its laws, its religion, its manners and customs
and its language were determined and established. It is with the last of
these, language, that we are here concerned. What that language is, and
how it became what it is, will be the subject of our next paper.
[A] “Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.” Georgicon II, 490.
[B] The grammar, it is to be said, is far more like that of the Greek
than like that of the Latin language.
[C] There is a language, the Lithuanian, spoken by a Leth-Slavonic
people, northwest of the Baltic, near Poland, which has preserved in a
remarkable and unique manner forms of the old Aryan speech which are
extinct in other European tongues. But it is the language of a small,
rude, unimportant people, without a literature, and indeed was not
written until the sixteenth century. It is of great interest to the
student of comparative philology, but of none to us at present.
[D] The Scandinavians, and all the peoples who are loosely called German
tribes, High-German, Low-German, and what-not, are generally regarded as
branches of a great Aryan stem, which is called the Teutonic race; and
some of my philological readers, should any such honor these unpretending
papers with their attention, may be surprised, and even offended, at my
omission of any mention of the great Teutonic family. As to this, my only
defense, or rather my only excuse, is that I have been unable to convince
myself of the existence of any such branch as the Teutonic, antecedent
to the Gothic, of which the Mæso-Goths were an early offshoot. I can
not see that the Teutones of the Roman historians represent an elder,
dominant, or parent branch of the Aryan race of which the Goths were a
younger and minor. As to the word German, and its use in “German tribes,”
“German dialects,” every scholar knows that it is not an indigenous name,
but that it was imposed from without, by strangers, upon the people who
bear it, who call themselves Deutch; and that this name was in effect
territorial, meaning all the people, of whatever race, who lived within
or beyond certain boundaries. As to the identity of origin in _Deu-tch_
and Teu-ton, that seems to me to be by no means clearly made out. For
Teutonic race I would substitute Gothic. The question from the present
point of view is happily not of serious or intrinsic importance.